Summer Adjournment

Justin Madders Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Amanda Milling). As the proud owner of a collie-Staffie cross, now sadly deceased, I wish Watchman V well.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak about something that happened today, and to which I alerted the House earlier in a point of order: the Government’s announcement, via a written statement—alongside 29 other written statements—of major increases in tuition fees for the year 2017-18. I want to speak in particular about the impact that it will have on students who either study in my constituency or come from my constituency and study elsewhere.

I think that the way the Government have dealt with this matter is thoroughly reprehensible. Only two days ago, we spent five or six hours in the Chamber debating the Higher Education and Research Bill. We engaged in a vigorous discussion of whether it was right to link fees to the Teaching Excellence Framework, but at no time during that process did Ministers take the opportunity to say anything about the issue. Today, however, it has been announced that from 2017-18, students at universities and colleges that pass a test, which I shall say more about in a moment, will pay £9,250 a year.

That underlines the fact that, as I said in the debate on Tuesday, the Teaching Excellence Framework is being used as a cash-in coupon. It demands no evidence of excellence in year 1; instead, it demands that providers achieve a “rating of Meets Expectations”. I think it would be mangling the English language to say that “Meets Expectations” is the same as achieving excellence, which is what the Teaching Excellence Framework is supposed to be about.

The Minister himself—the Minister for Universities and Science—spoke about the potential for increases in the debates on the Queen’s Speech:

“I can confirm that the rate of inflation applying to maximum fees for institutions demonstrating high-quality teaching is 2.8%.”—[Official Report, 25 May 2016; Vol. 611, c. 559.]

I am not suggesting that the Minister has been economical with the facts, or that the statement has been economical with the facts, but I think that making the link in that way could be regarded as being economical with the truth.

I said that I wanted to talk about the impact that the increase would have. It is not just a question of increasing the fees; it is also a question of increasing the loans by 2.8% to match that increase in the fees. That will, in due course, hit all the students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There are about half a million of them in the country, of whom nearly 34,000 are at further education colleges that provide higher education courses. Those colleges include my own excellent local college, Blackpool and the Fylde, whose higher education institute was built in 2008 with funds from the Labour Government. More than 2,800 students are now studying at the institute. Those students are now going to be hit by a double-whammy: not only will they have their grants taken away—and future students will as well—from 2017-18, and have to pay, as they knew, a fee of £9,000, but they are now going to have to pay 2.8% on top of that. If we are interested in getting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education, and in getting their contribution to local regional economies like the north-west’s, this is not the way to go about it.

Let me quote some other figures about students doing HE at FE colleges: there are 1,800 students in that position at Blackburn college, and 1,000 at the Manchester group of colleges. With regard to universities catering to large numbers of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, there are 14,000 students in this position at Manchester Met and 8,000-plus at Manchester University.

I have chosen those examples because they are all within the catchment area that young people in Blackpool who might not be able to go to a university or FE college further away are likely to choose. It really is not satisfactory to proceed in the way the Government have done. Apart from anything else, it will tarnish the reputation of the Teaching Excellence Framework, and it is not good for this House’s processes. This should have been discussed and voted on—it will be eventually—later in the year. Instead, the Minister had a golden opportunity to discuss it on Tuesday but failed to do so. Clearly, the Government did not feel that they had a very strong case.

I ask Members to reflect on not only the damage this is going to cause to the sorts of young people I am talking about, but the dangerous slope that we go down, and which we went down earlier this year, when major issues that are going to affect people are dealt with by statutory instrument. That is what is being indicated in the small print of the Government’s statement today.

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that another announcement sneaked out by the Government today was the decision to abolish the student nurse bursaries, which again is going to have serious implications for social mobility in higher education and the health service?

[Mr Marsden]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent and very germane point, because the abolition of NHS bursaries in the round and their replacement by loans will have a similar dampening effect on social mobility, particularly in the north-west where there are large numbers of students and institutions—Edge Hill University and others in Chester and elsewhere—where students have been turned out very successfully for the benefit of our national health services, including in Blackpool. I can think of one member of my constituency Labour party who has gone down that route.

I want to end by juxtaposing all those issues and lives and careers I have talked about with the necessity to do proper process in this House. If we are going to make decisions like this, they should not be sneaked out in a written statement when Ministers do not have the opportunity to deal with any discussion or debate for at least six weeks.

I put this on the record to the duty Minister on the Front Bench: when this matter comes to the House for proper decision, I and, I am sure, many of my colleagues will expect it to be dealt with on the Floor of the House, not squirreled away in some statutory instrument along the Corridor.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

There have been several notable contributions today, many of which have touched on the issues that I want to raise, so I hope that mine will match the quality shown thus far. I intend to talk about what I consider to be the holy trinity—not Law, Best and Charlton, but three of the most important pillars of my politics: jobs, homes and health. I believe that if people are confident that they have security and fairness at work, that they will have a roof over their head and that they will be cared for if they fall ill, we have the essential preconditions, foundations, and building blocks for creating a fair and equal society. I should make it clear that those principles are only the start and that there is clearly so much more beyond them, but I want to address them today because we cannot hope to address anything else unless we get the basics right.

I have said previously that a jobs policy does not just mean aiming for full employment; we should value the quality of the jobs that are created. Jobs must be permanent, secure and properly paid. We saw during the EU referendum campaign that telling someone on a zero-hours contract or in agency work that there is a risk to their job from Brexit just did not cut it. There is a culture in this country that views employment as a flexible, disposable concept, with people not knowing from one week to the next how many hours they will work or whether they will work at all, and yet some still wonder why millions of people chose to reject the status quo.

Even for those who have secured permanent employment, this country’s workplace protections are pathetic. How can someone give nearly two years of their life to an employer, not putting a foot wrong, and still find themselves cast aside without reason and without recompense? How can we build a country in which people feel confident enough to plan their life and for the future, if we have such a casual attitude towards the means by which they can build that future? I want a country where people have the security of knowing that if they do a good job and if their employer runs the business well, they will be rewarded properly and are likely to stay in work. What we have instead is a hire-and-fire culture in which workers are seen as disposable commodities—figures on a spreadsheet—rather than real people with lives that matter.

The prospect of replacing people with machines has always been with us, but the future looks bleak for the millions of jobs that are set to become automated. Artificial intelligence will decimate skilled jobs, and we have the ever-present threat of jobs being exported to lower-wage economies. I am sorry to say that many politicians see that as progress and others are blissfully unaware of what the future will bring, but nobody has yet come up with a compelling strategy for how to respond to what amounts to a huge challenge for every country in the western world. If we do not start thinking seriously about how to tackle the problem, the wave of resentment that led to the Brexit vote will look like a small ripple in a pond.

Turning to homes, in every surgery I hold there will always be constituents who cannot get on the council waiting list, cannot afford private sector rents and, because of their circumstances, cannot countenance owning a home of their own. Even those in secure employment find themselves unable to match that with a secure home of their own. Successive Governments have failed to address this issue, but the current Administration seem determined to decimate social housing in this country. My constituency has plenty of sites where planning permissions have been granted for new homes, but almost every one of those has, at one stage or another, been amended to remove the obligation to build affordable housing. The situation is unsustainable, and insecurity at work being matched for many by insecurity at home is leading to the resentment I have referred to being magnified.

The final pillar of the three that I wish to talk about is health. It may be trite to say it, but we are incredibly fortunate to live in a country where no matter who you are and no matter what your means, you can be assured that if you fall ill you will receive, free of charge, some of the very best medical treatment in the world. But the Labour party’s proudest achievement, the NHS, is in mortal danger under this Government. In what has been the most unpredictable time in recent political history, with so many resignations, sackings and job changes, some would say one of the biggest surprises of this whole period is that the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt) is still in his job as Secretary of State for Health.

Put simply:

“The NHS is in a mess”

and there have been

“five years of decline on all of the things that people would worry about.”

Those are not my words, but the words of the chief executive of NHS Improvement, Jim Mackey. The NHS is arguably facing its biggest challenge since its creation. It is failing to meet key performance targets month after month. NHS trusts and foundation trusts had a combined deficit of £2.45 billion in 2015-16, and the situation continues to deteriorate, yet the Secretary of State is still in his job. I know I have talked about employment security today, but that is surely taking things a step too far.

Only this week the Health Committee confirmed what we knew all along: the Government's claim that they are putting an additional £10 billion into the NHS does not stand up to scrutiny. The Committee put the actual figure at less than half of that and went on to say that “accounting devices” are being used to “balance the books”, which

“give a false impression that the current financial situation is better than it is.”

These devices include moving hundreds of millions of pounds from an already stretched capital budget to plug holes on the revenue side, depriving the NHS of the infrastructure investment it urgently needs and storing up problems for the future. They also include moving funds over from the public health budget, a move the Health Committee describes as

“a false economy, creating avoidable additional costs in the future.”

In addition, there is a workforce crisis, with 15% of clinical posts vacant in some parts of London and a shocking £3.3 billion spent in the last year on agency staff, a situation that will only worsen with the announcement sneaked out today about the abolition of nurse bursaries. This toxic cocktail is only going to get worse. How long before we see a Minister say that the current situation is unsustainable and the principle of free treatment at the point of use has to be sacrificed? If that is taken away, one of the pillars critical to a stable and just society is taken away.

I consider the three pillars needed for a decent society that I have described to be crumbling at an alarming rate. My party will be spending much of the summer discussing the relative merits of our two leadership candidates, but I hope that there will be an opportunity during this debate to consider how we tackle the challenges ahead that I have referred to, so that at the end of the process we are able to present to the country a united front and a compelling answer on these issues. If we can do that—if we can look and sound like a Government ready and waiting to rebuild our fractured society—we will have half a chance of actually being able to do that.